Return To 'Salem's Lot
by Thoringil
Summary: My first attempt at fan fiction, r/r.... Mark Petrie returns to 'Salem's Lot to confront his past once he realizes he will have no future... Some foul language.


He came back. Not for kicks, or because he couldn't resist 'Salem's Lot any longer. The Lot held no joy for him, all his memories of it were tainted in blood.  
  
He'd lived there as a boy, thirty years earlier. Now, at forty-two, he was coming back. Bringing something Jerusalem's Lot had not seen in a very long time... fresh blood.  
  
Of course, he didn't know if any of them had survived. Thirty years was a long time. It could be that he'd return to find an empty town, buildings never rebuilt after the fire they'd started... Him and Ben Mears and a Pall Mall cigarette, ridding the world of the Nosferatu. It might have worked... He didn't know, and Ben was dead, and Mark was dying, so he came back.  
  
Cancer, the doctors told him, and he had no doubt they were right. A foreign cell, destroying and converting other cells in the body, until the whole was destroyed. So, in what might have been his final act, he hopped in the car, and returned to The Lot, the tumor of his childhood. Barlow, the invading cell. Mark wondered if the master vampire was dead... They'd stabbed him, and he should have died, but... his teeth. Mark would always remember Barlow's canine teeth, wriggling in the palm of Ben's hand. He shivered in the car, and pulled a cigarette from the glove compartment, and lit it with a shaking hand.  
  
Of course, that was hardly his first terrifying encounter with the leader of the vampires... Mark Petrie still woke up in cold sweat at the memory of his parents skulls slammed together like melons, still shuddered at Barlow's threat, that Mark would enter his service as "choirboy castratum".  
  
He almost passed by the sign to Jerusalem's Lot without noticing it... "Welcome to Jerusalem's Lot" it read... And below it, a sinister piece of grafitti: "Blood Sausage our Specialty". His eyes widened, and he contemplated turning back. But what did it matter, he was already dead. Or close enough. A brain tumor the size of a golf ball, completely inoperable, was slowly killing him.  
  
Still... Some things are worse than death, he thought. Life didn't bother him any more. Ben was dead, Mark had never married, had put out a few successful novels (a shared talent with his stepfather). In short, a life hardly lived. The rest of him was still in 'Salem's Lot, with Barlow and Straker and the vampire crew. It didn't matter that Straker was dead, killed by his master in rage over Mark's escape.. Nor did it matter that Barlow was probably dead as well... He had to see.  
  
He came around a corner, and could see the entire town for the first time. Nothing had been rebuilt, the roads were cracked and plants grew from them. Scorched remnants of buildings lay collapsed along the roads, covered in dirt and moss. One building had survived... Of course, he told himself, the Marsten House would survive. Its the root of it all. It brought Barlow and Straker, it called Ben back. It's been sitting on that hill, overlooking the town like a dark god, watching all our petty little evils... Then, it housed our greatest one, our own little cancer, Barlow...  
  
The fire had spared the Marsten house, just as the one of Ben's youth had been turned aside just before it... Barlow's dead, Mark began to chant to himself. Dead, dead, dead... We killed him, we stabbed his fucking heart and we killed him! He lived so long, but we got him and he's fucking dead, so why is that place still standing?  
  
"What evil lingers?" He asked himself, spooked at the sound of his voice. He looked up into the mirror hastily, examining himself. Forty two, a little overweight (a belly, he'd protest), still had a full head of hair, which was more than most his age could say. Blue eyes which normally looked so cool and remote, but were now wide and fearful. Expensive, custom-made suit, a very fancy sleet gray, so out of place in mostly-rural Maine.  
  
He looked like the ultimate normal man, so common he'd disappear in a crowd in a second, save that his heart was pounding and his forehead was beaded with sweat. I'm back, back in 'Salem's Lot, going to see the sights.  
  
He drove right by where Eva Miller's boarding-house had been, where Barlow had slept after they'd cast him out of the Marsten House, by leaving a communion wafer. Where Ben's friend Jimmy had lost his life in the basement, thanks to the cunning Barlow. Cut the stairs after the second, left the banister in the darkness... Jimmy just assumed the stairs were there, who wouldn't? He passed by a dozen places where they'd stopped and staked vampires, the McDougall house where he'd suggested pulling them out into the sun instead... His skin crawled at the reminder. Roy McDougall had started to fry, and it wasn't like Dracula movies. It was slow, and sickening, and had nearly driven Mark out of his mind. Not that he was a far distance from insanity in those days anyways... Staking after staking, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Then, fuck this, let God sort them out. They walked away, and tried to forget...  
  
But they came back, when it was hot enough, and dry enough. Came back, and burnt The Lot to the ground. "Ashes to ashes as we burn this fucker down," I remember a song like that, he told himself. And it worked, like a charm, like taking candy from a baby... Except the fucking house is still there!  
  
He popped on the radio and tried not to think, cruising around town, getting closer and closer to the Marsten House. As long as it was still there, everything couldn't be all right. If it were finished, he knew, the house would be gone. Just gone, without a trace, like a bad memory. Tumor removed... The patient would have a chance to survive, to flourish again.  
  
Eventually, house or no house, they were going to rebuild, and without a doubt he knew what would happen. If not Barlow, then something else, something worse...  
  
He eventually parked in front of the Marsten House, then sat in the care for a long while, pleading and fighting with himself. But Mark had never been a coward, not since a night long ago where he spat in a vampire's face and swore to kill him. The night his parents died.  
  
So he stepped out, and walked up the steps to the front door. On the way up, time slowed to a sluggish pace, and he could hear every noise with distincitive clarity. The creak of the steps, the sound of his panting breath, crickets in the background. Every step was a test of courage, his heart was jack-hammering in his chest.  
  
What the hell am I doing? I shouldn't be here, if there's still something wrong, I can't fix it... I'm too damn old... A strange image came to him, one he'd never seen before. A man facing off a giant spider that wasn't a giant spider at all... And somehow he knew that the spider could also be a clown, or a werewolf or a mummy, any child's nightmare, but wasn't any of those things... Deadlights...... He thought, though it was a meaningless word and a meaningless image. Yet he took courage from it. The man facing the Non-spider was also a boy somehow, had faced it as a boy... And the boy and the man beat it, though they were one and the same.  
  
Don't be foolish Mark, he berated himself. That's a daydream, for Christ's sake... It doesn't mean anything at all! Don't kill yourself over a daydream!  
  
Yet as he reached the top of the steps and put his hand on the doorknob, he knew it was too late. The door swung open silently, and he stepped inside, and closed it behind him. "Hello?" He called, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. An exercise in futility, for he sounded hysterical.  
  
Nothing answered. What did you expect? Barlow himself would pop up and say "Hey little buddy, don't sweat it, we're all cool now?"  
  
He walked through the house, confused. The last time he had been in the place, it had been packed with all sorts of junk. Old newspapers, strange furniture, nothing valuable. Where'd it go? He wondered.  
  
Don't be stupid Mark. Someone came and took it, that's all...  
  
"Oh, really?" He scolded himself. "Who exactly took a few metric tons of old newspapers?  
  
Good question, the voice acknowledged, and he laughed, probably the first time anyone had ever laughed in the Marsten house... Other than those maniacal bad guy laughs from B movies.  
  
He made his way through the entire house, and to his suprise he was a little disappointed. He was dying, this was one of his last acts, and nothing? No vampires to fight, no stakes to pound? 30 years gone, and nothing?  
  
I suppose I should be relieved... Still, he remembered the house's illustrious history, and decided he take no chances of repeat performances. "Ashes to ashes as we burn this fucker down" he told himself again.  
  
The basement still held plenty of papers, old magazines, and the like, and the fire was started simply enough with his Bic lighter. He made his way up the stairs and to the door... Only to find it locked. I have a very bad feeling about this, he told himself, as smoke began to fill the air. The back door was locked as well, and every window in the house had been boarded up long ago.  
  
He heard it then, the laughter in the house. Not the "bad guy" laughter he'd been ridiculing, but a sound that froze his blood and set his teeth chattering and heart pumping. The laughter was death. Not Barlow, not Straker, not any of the lesser evils. The house. "You'll burn too!" He screamed hoarsely. "I'll die, but you'll fucking burn to the ground! You'll be one more charred building in this little shitpile!"  
  
He had another vision then, even stranger than the one of the man and the spider which was not a spider. He saw a million other worlds extending from his own, each attached. Territories, he somehow knew. In each, an evil building, a spawning ground for nightmares was burning, and in each he was dying. He smiled. "I won, motherfucker. You lose this time, there's no wind to change, the place is already burning. Our mutual pal Barlow took care of 'Salem's Lot's fire department long ago, drank them like fine wine, and now its just you and me!" The temperature was getting very high, sweat poured from him.  
  
He heard a roar of rage, but in it there was that same laughter, the laughter of death, and he collapsed to the ground, overwhelmed by the heat. "Sorry pal, you just lost a playground.... I bid you adieu, Crimson King." Somehow he knew that name, knew that it was the force that had made the Marsten house, a black tumor on all the worlds.  
  
As he fell into blackness, the raging screams increased, and he laughed. His laughter echoed off the walls and filled his ears, covering the mad wailings of the house's owner. 


End file.
